3:25 a.m.
I have to get up very early in the morning for a doctor appointment, and in the evening I was torn between taking my sleeping med, and possibly being logy in the morning, and not taking my sleeping med, and spending a long, restless, wakeful night.
I opted for the latter. That is why I am awake—again—at 3 in the morning. The most common form of my insomnia is that I am able to fall asleep, but not able to stay asleep. Some night this means I wake up after only a half an hour or forty-five minutes; other nights, I sleep for a couple of hours at time, am awake for a bit, sleep some more. Tonight has been a night of very short sleep and relatively long “reverse siestas,” as Arden calls them.
I like waking up at 3 in the morning. 3:00 eastern is when the NY Times Spelling Bee puzzle drops, and I love the Spelling Bee puzzle. Sometimes I try to do it even when I am not really wakeful, but merely need to run to the bathroom and go back to sleep. I cannot wait to do the Spelling Bee, but on the nights when I should—and can—go immediately back to sleep, I am hilariously inept at it. I will stare at it blearily, find a few words, get stuck, and go backc to sleep. In the morning, after a sufficient amount of sleep, I will laugh at myself as I find all the easy four letter words: pine. pike. pipe. nine. etc.
I get Queen Bee every day, and, since right now I can’t sleep and need to take a break because I cannot find the last two words (AD, five letters; AP, seven letters), I will tell you I got to this magical place where I have an unbroken streak of hundreds of Queen Bees.
I learned to do it by finding every single word in every single puzzle by whatever method I needed.
Of course, I would find all the words that jumped right out at me. Then I would consult the Spelling Bee Buddy, which shows you the two-letter list (how many words, and how long, beginning with each set of the first two letters), and will also show you hints, if you like, that range from, “Good job finding two words that start with AN! There are still more!” to “Can you find more words that begin PINK?” to “This puzzle allows for the suffix -ED.”
After 9 am, you can also get reader-supplied clues, though these often just annoy me. Sometimes, the clue is less a “clue” than a dictionary definition, and I’d prefer something more like a hint than an outright answer; sometimes, the clue suggests an adjective when the word in question is actually a verb (if I were in charge of choosing these reader-suggested clues, I would not allow such things); sometimes, they’re just useless.
When I started doing the puzzle, if the clues in the Spelling Bee Buddy weren’t enough for me, I’d move on to other tools. For instance, there are websites that will provide you with a complete list of, say, “Five letter words that being AF.” And there are websites that will tell you the day’s Spelling Bee solution.
You may say this is cheating, but I found this method invaluable as a learning tool. If you don’t look to see what words you’ve missed, you’ll never learn them, and the words get pretty predictable. Sometimes the words I wasn’t able to get were words I simply didn’t know; a lot of Italian and Spanish names for foods fall into this category for me, and so did the word NATICK, which shows up surprisingly often. It has been useful to know this word, and I learned it from peeking shamelessly at the answers.
Sometimes the words I missed are words I know but would never have thought of on my own. AIOLI, for instance, which I am now trained to spot. If the puzzle is one that has a lot of words, many of them short and common, my last-ditch desperate hunt for words I’ve missed will turn up some hilariously obvious ones that I missed, because it’s very hard to keep track of a whole bunch of words spelled -A-E, for instance. Sometimes I missed a word because I thought I’d already gotten it; the last word I found on today’s puzzle before telling myself to take a break was a common word I kept not putting in because I assumed I’d already done so. Fortunately, one of my methods for finding more words is to just start typing any word that comes to mind, even if it’s a repeat, because sometimes this will jog my mind. Every now and then, as happened just now, I put in a word so obvious I certainly already found it, only to get the happy little endorphin rush of crossing one more word off the two-letter list.
Anyway, it’s been some months now that I almost never have to resort to “7 letter words starting FU” or the Spelling Bee Solver. But I highly recommend going as far as you can on your own, and then looking to see what you missed. It’s a great way to learn.
This is also how I learned to do the NY Times crossword on the harder days, by turning on Autocorrect when I got badly stuck, and in this way I learned all kinds of things about how the puzzles work and what they want from me.
I had a really interesting experience a few months ago,when the Spelling Bee puzzles suddenly got much, much easier. I thought it was truly that there was a string of unusually easy puzzles, but eventually, when it persisted, I realized that I had simply leveled up, that I had rocketed off a learning plateau overnight.
It used to take me all day, sometimes, to do the puzzle. I’m a big fan of going away and coming back after awhile with fresh eyes, and sometimes I would still be bringing my fresh eyes back to the puzzle 12 hours after I started it, only resorting to the last-ditch “just give me the answer, already!” options late in the evening.
Now, I sometimes complete the whole puzzle in six monutes at 3:45 in the morning without resorting to anything more than the two-letter list. “Sometimes” I say. I should say more accurately, “on very rare occasions, when my brain is working well and the puzzle is full of words I recognize easily.” It is rather a thrill. But on almost any given day, I get to the point of having only two or three words left to find with the two-letter list. I generally don’t resort to the reader-supplied clues or the Spelling Bee Solver until I’m down to low single digits; at that point, if I haven’t figured them out, I’m probably not going to, and I’ve probably reached the limit of what taking long breaks can accomplish.
And yet, sometimes still, one of those final words turns out to be something common and obvious I just overlooked. When I’ve been struggling on and off for half the day, it is both hilarious and exasperating to find that I have been beating my head against a wall called PAINTED or MAILBOX.
I highly recommend my method for getting good at Spelling Bee, if that’s something you want to do. Some people, I’m sure, get really good at it without having to work nearly as hard as I did. I’m guessing, for instance, my friend Danni, if xe does the puzzle at all; or my friend dan.
Ha, just popped back into the puzzle and found the second-to-last word!
What else? I should try again to sleep, but I can feel that it would be fruitless.
I have found that I am generally really good at being poor. I am blessed with not having many expensive aspirations: I do not feel deprived that I can’t fly to Europe (or anyplace else), for instance. It has been unusually challenging for me lately, though—I’ve been having some trouble making my grocery money last until my next payment comes from my IRA, and, for a couple of weeks, was nearly at the point of needing to ration food. I wan’t at risk of going hungry, but I was starting to have to be aware that I needed to make what I had last, say, five days, and not be careless about having a snack or having more of something just because it tasted so good. I ended up doing something I have rarely had to do since I left David: borrow a little money from a friend to get me through the last couple of days.
I was also having the disorienting feeling that I didn’t have as much food in the fridge as I thought I should. It took me longer than it should have to figure out that Athena, who moved back in at the beginning of May and will be staying with Alexis through the end of the summer, was eating my stuff. Alexis and I have very clear boundaries around food: we do not each anything the other has bought without asking first, with a couple of specific exceptions. For instance, if I have indulged and bought a six-pack of Vernors, Alexis is totally allowed to have some, so long as they don’t drink the last one.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I had to make this explicit with Athena. Foolish, I know, but I had gotten into the habit with Alexis and just didn’t think of it. Once I told Athena she wasn’t to eat my food, I miraculously started having enough again.
Alexis told me once that she has a problem with Athena eating all of something before Alexis has had a chance at it. The other day, I was getting groceries and I brought home a half-gallon of mint chocolate chip for the two of them, just to be nice. I saw the empty container in the trash the next day, and later, Alexis asked me if I’d eaten any of it. I said no, and Alexis looked frustrated and angry, and I realized that Athena had eaten all of it. She is selfish that way, and it’s been an issue in their relationship for a long time.
Interestingly, the dynamic between them is exactly the same as one I had with my first girlfriend when we got our own apartment. I grew up in abundance; we didn’t actually have an unlimited grocery budget, but it felt like it. Generally my mom would get anything we asked for, and if we ran out of something, she’d get more the next time. Joey grew up with severe food insecurity.
Our issue became apparent when we bought a gallon of apple cider one day. I was a grad student, mostly working at home, and Joey had an 8-hour-a-day job. I drank as much cider as I wanted, as often as I wanted. I always had! I knew that if we ran out of cider, it was trivial to bring home more. I had no sense of scarcity around things like that, and lacked the sensitivity to realize that, even if we could buy more cider with next week’s shopping, Joey might nonetheless reasonably expect to have some of this week’s cider now.
Joey explained to me that growing up so poor, her tendency when she got something that seemed like a treat, like the cider, was to make it last as long as possible. This meant small servings at widely spaced intervals, not the giant water glasses full I was pouring for myself, and casually refilling if I wanted more.
For me and Joey, this was a single conversation that was illuminating for both of us, and I was able to manage it much better going forward. Athena, sadly, has a very hard time seeing other people’s perspectives, and she often plows through food that Alexis wanted to savor—or, as with the mint chip ice cream, wanted to have some at all. I am not sure to what extent Alexis has actually talked to Athena about this. They are terribly conflict-averse. They remind me of younger me: I had learned so thoroughly from my family that no one was going to listen to me or offer me help that I gave up asking. It has been a lifelong process to learn to do things differently, and I still sometimes squash things I should almost certainly bring into the open.
Oh hey! I feel like I could sleep now, so I’m going to try. If I go to sleep now, I can get two and a half hours before my alarm goes off! Though I might nudge the alarm back fifteen minutes and take the shower off the morning agenda.
I have a to-do list for tomorrow, as always, but I predict I’ll be taking a long and hopefully luxurious afternoon nap instead.
This doctor appointment is such a nothingburger. I have to see my hematologist, who monitors my low platelets. My platelets were up to 56k the last time I got tested, a few weeks ago, which is great! I’ve been at about 32k for the past year. It’s because of the immune suppressors I’m on for the autoimmune hepatitis. So tomorrow’s appointment will be the doctor saying, “Platelets are looking good!” and me saying, “Yes, It’s because of the immune suppressors I’m on for the autoimmune hepatitis,” and him saying, “Keep getting your monthly CBC and come back in six months” and, while I sill keep getting my monthly CBC (except when I’m at Pendle Hill over the summer, because I’m on Medicaid and therefore have no insurance when I’m not in Michigan) but I might or might not see the hematologist again in six months, because this is how all of my appointments go except when my platelets have crashed, which they’ve only really done twice in the 25 years I’ve had this condition, so I don’t tend to feel like regular check-ins are really a priority, which is probably very wrong of me, but whatever.
Time to get to bed or I’ll get to see the sun come up, and that is not something I enjoy.
Su